This invention relates to interactive toy products and, in particular, to electronically based products with a screen display under the control of a games program.
For many Centuries, vehicles and human characters have been the inspiration for toys, which have remained universally popular. In past Centuries, dolls and toy horse-drawn vehicles have provided many children with the opportunity of imaginative and creative play; the popularity of toy trains is legendary. In the last Century, the numbers of dolls, toy cars, trucks and similar vehicles sold has exceeded many hundreds of millions. This has been achieved despite the fact that for the majority of this time, the dolls did little more than have movable limbs and the vehicles did little more than run along a predetermined course in a tolerably straight line under the impetus of a push from the user. More recently, energy storage and motor technology has enabled toy vehicles to be self-propelled, and advances in electronics have enabled remotely controllable vehicles which could stop, start and steer to be produced. These have proved to be extremely popular. Vehicle shapes have also been pressed into service in non-toy applications such as cigarette boxes, cigarette lighters, key fobs and computer mice.
In a separate stream of technological development, the last two decades have seen explosive growth in the area of computer games as computer-based equipment became available at affordable prices, and this has resulted in the development of an entire new leisure market. While originally computer games were simply programs which could be loaded into a pre-existing general purpose computer, a market rapidly developed for dedicated games machines, and, in one segment of the market, this led to the development and highly successful commercialization of hand-held computer-based apparatus. This had the major advantage of portability and such apparatus generally consists of a casing enclosing and protecting the electronics and having a screen set in it which is viewed by the user when playing the game. Small, low power consumption screens have been specifically developed for this purpose, and a wide variety of such screens is known.
Control of the game activity is effected by manual actuation of appropriate input devices, for example, press-buttons, a joystick, a roller ball, a mouse or a touch screen, or a combination of any of these. The control of the display is achieved by a combination of sophisticated electronics and programming on the one hand, and the external influence of suitable actuators such as switches, press-buttons and joysticks. Using this general approach, a wide variety of products has appeared on the market and some of them have been highly commercially successful. However, these input devices are general purpose input devices not correlated with the nature of the game activity.